Morality through Relationship

If you’ve ever been to Outback Steakhouse, you would notice several menu items listed as “no rules.”  I’m not really sure what it means – perhaps you can have it however you want it; or perhaps it is so decadent that you must not rules about healthy eating if you order it.

Some people think of Jesus as an “Outback Steakhouse” kind of guy – “no rules” is his motto.  Why worry about all those pesky rules that the Pharisees followed – just love Jesus, believe he is the Son of God, and you are saved!  After all, if we could save ourselves by following rules, why would God find it necessary to send His only Son to take on our mortal nature and suffer and die like the rest of us?

Yet, this morning we hear Jesus tells us that we should not break “the smallest part of the smallest letter of the law” or, heaven forbid, teach others to break the law. (Mt 5:18-19) In other places, he implies that at least part of the law is a gift from God, created solely for our benefit – “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mk 2:27).  As a devout Jew, it seems certain that Jesus was also a good follower of the law.  Otherwise, the Pharisees would not have invited him to dine with them, as they were scrupulous about not eating with those whom they considered unclean.

So, how do we reconcile salvation through God’s mercy and the need to follow the law and to encourage others to keep the law?  One clue is to look back at the Ten Commandments, which we just heard at Mass this past Sunday.

Before listing the fundamental moral and ethical rules – rules which guide our behavior and attitudes towards others, we are given the first three commandments that lay out our relationship with God. 

First, God is to be the most important thing in our lives.  Nothing can be more important to us than God, for that thing – which must have been created by God and is therefore inferior to God – must be a false god.  Second, God must not only be number one in our hearts, but he is also number one in our speech.  We should not use his name – for the ancients, the name was the essence of a person – frivolously, for our relationship is too serious and important.  Finally, He should be number one in our actions – so much so that we should be willing to dedicate one day of seven completely to him, putting aside our worldly concerns and duties to spend “quality time” with him.

Locked into this intense relationship with God, the rest of the law – how we are to interact with the all of God’s creation – flows as naturally water under the bridge.

The Ten Commandments – and Jesus – teach us that our morality is not based on a rule book, but on a relationship.  The rules that we follow are simply a consequence of our relationship with the One who created us, the One who loves us without limit or condition, and the one who desires nothing from us by our complete and utter love.  If we live in this relationship, the rules become part of our lives.  We enter a virtuous cycle.  Our love of God encourages and strengthens us to follow Jesus’ rule of love.  This, in turn, deepens our relationship with Jesus, and we are then emboldened to love his creation even more richly.

In contrast, if we ignore the relationship with God, if we separate ourselves from the love inherent to that relationship, the rule of love becomes a heavy burden, and we easily put it aside whenever the going gets too tough.  This is a vicious cycle.  As we deny or ignore the love of God, our love of his creation wanes.  This turns us into ourselves, and we become even less sensitive to the love of God, our only source of strength and courage, further weakening and discouraging our desire to love his creation.

Lent calls us to double down, or perhaps triple down, on our relationship with God – enriching it with our prayer, realizing the emptiness of false gods with our fasting, and remembering his great love and providence through our almsgiving.   Let the virtuous cycle begin.

Obedience

I’ve never had much problem following the Ten Commandments.  Well, I can’t say that I’ve always obeyed each and every one, for if I said that, I’d be breaking one of them right then and there.  But I’ve always known that I should follow them as best I can.  I’ve always felt guilty if I broke one of them and knew that when I did break them, I needed God to forgive me.  What I didn’t know, or knew wrongly, was why this was so.  Why should I obey them at all?

I suppose my first thought was that I was an oldest child.  Many psychologists have theorized that first-born children are compliant, seeking to be seen as upright, responsible mini-adults, someone like their parents who were the only ones in their lives at the most formative stage.  The theory may or not be true, but I was certainly like that.  My mom and dad were good people who obeyed the commandments. I wanted to see to be like them, so I obeyed, too.   So I internalized that my purpose in obeying the commandments was so that people would think I was good; that I was a grown-up.  But this couldn’t be the real purpose.  I’m grown-up now.  Do I still have to obey the commandments?  Isn’t it possible to be grown-up without obeying these ancient rules?

Of course, I soon learned that the Ten Commandments weren’t just my parents’ rules, they were God’s rules.  And Sr. Thecla assured my classmates and me that if we didn’t follow God’s rules, really, really, bad things would happen.  And of course, that’s true.  If I willfully and habitually ignore the commandments, I build walls between me and God.  If those walls get thick enough, I may never even know or believe that God is on the other side.  I may have walled myself into hell.  As I recall, Sr. Thecla had a much more graphic description of that process.

And while this is certainly a good reason to not break the laws, I then made a deadly mistake, though it seemed to make perfect sense.  If by breaking the laws, I damned myself to hell, then my purpose in following the laws was to gain my place in heaven.  The closer I followed the laws, the better I would be and then, the God would reward my obedience with more love and with heaven itself.   Not only would the laws save me from hell, they would save me for heaven.  For most of my life, I used this to justify following the Commandments.  But I was wrong again.  Even more importantly, my mistaken view of the Law’s purpose led me into dangerous spiritual ground.

I became quite proud of my obedience.  I found that I was much better at following the law than many of the people I knew.   That’s what a lifetime of practice would do for you.  Being better at following the law, I believed, made me a better person than many of the other people I knew.  I could even assume that because of my scrupulous obedience, God would love me more than he loved those who ignored his law.  After all, they were going to hell, right?  I was headed in the other direction.

Then came Jesus.  Jesus teaches us throughout the Gospel that salvation comes not through the law, but through relationship with Him, who is in intimate relationship with the Father.  It is only when we love and live in this intimate relationship, that we see the law as God’s gift, given to us to allow us to praise God, to thank God, and to love God as he loves us.  Certainly Jesus insists that we should obey the law, but our obedience does not lead to our salvation.  Rather, our salvation leads to our obedience.

We do not obey out of fear, as a slave obeys his master to avoid a lashing, but rather we obey out of love and gratitude, as a loved child obeys a loving parent, as a husband obeys his wife, and as a wife obeys her husband.

Furthermore, this proper ordering and interplay of grace and works then changes our view of the rest of God’s creation.   As we live in relationship with God and his infinite, unconditional and eternal mercy, we are impelled to go beyond the law – to live the fulfillment of the law which is Jesus himself, the one who laid down his life for me, for you, and for all of creation.  We see those who do not follow the law not as the damned and the lost, those less loved by God and by us, but as those who have not yet realized the grace of their salvation, have not yet experienced or recognized the great bounty of God’s love.

Why should I obey the Ten Commandments?  It is the right and just response to the good news that Jesus, out of God’s great love and mercy, has died to save me from the fires of hell, and desires me to enter into relationship with the one who is all love; the one who is all joy; the one who is all peace.

I obey the Ten Commandments not for my own gain, but as witness to the world of the infinite and unconditional love I have already received as pure gift; a gift offered to one and to all, forever and ever, amen.